


wring the water from wine.

by cereal



Category: Big (1988)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-19
Updated: 2008-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 05:15:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1633457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cereal/pseuds/cereal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He didn't do anything, really, but wish to go back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wring the water from wine.

**Author's Note:**

> I signed up to potentially write in this fandom thinking it would be fun, but after re-watching the movie a couple of times, I realized it was actually kind of messed up, what happened to him, so this ended up being angsty. Thanks to Kathleen/belovedsnail and Michelle/mordecai for looking over it and telling me I wouldn't be fired from the internet for posting it.
> 
> Written for Terrie

 

 

He's all over the news the day he comes back. His mom smothers him, hugging and crying and he almost can't breathe with her sweater all wrinkled against his face.

He hugs her back for a long time and waits to cry, out of relief, out of joy, out of maybe something like exhaustion, because seriously, work is actually tiring, worse than school, but he doesn't cry. He just sort of laughs and coughs and lets his mom sob into his hair. 

When he finally breaks away, it's gentle, like he does when putting Rachel down to sleep and then, before he even gets to see Rachel, there are police and news crews and he doesn't know who called them and for a minute doesn't even get why they're there and then it's a spazzed-out six hours.

The cops, the reporters, his mom, everybody wants to know: who had him, what did they do to him and why. He feels smarter now, older than 13, and refuses to talk until he sees Billy. If he can just make sure Billy hears whatever story he's about to spin, he knows it'll be OK. Billy will back him and he won't have to tell anybody the truth. He won't have to tell his mom she threatened him with a very sharp, very large, kitchen knife.

When Billy's there and everybody's standing on the porch in a makeshift press conference, he just lets himself say whatever comes out first. It's some stupid, generic story from every movie he's ever seen about kidnappings.

He has to iron out a lot more details of the story as the days go by and the police investigate more, but he's just vague enough that there isn't any way to prove he's lying. It probably helps that his mom is too happy to just have him back and she just wants to "move on." That's it, over and over again, "move on." And "move forward." 

It's mostly dropped after nine days and he goes back to school on the tenth. But it's hard to move forward, back in school, back in class, back with girls whose yardstick for dating used to be whether you can drive.

That's one of the super messed up things - he's still three years away from driving. 

Cynthia handles it better than any of the other girls, who are now throwing themselves at him, in their awkward ninth grade way, searching for danger or fame or whatever they want from him that isn't actually letting him kiss with tongue or any of the other bases. Cynthia just asks about it, puts her hand on top of his, and he's disappointed to see that, back in his old (young) body, his hands are smaller than hers. 

It takes 14-and-a-half months for him grow as tall as he was at 30. Or however old he was. Billy was right - he could've been older than that. 

The morning he wakes up and looks in the mirror to see close to what he saw after his wish - face, hair, whatever - he is 17. He will never have touched a girl's tits with anything but those larger hands. He will never have had to face the weirdness of some girl trying to get in his pants knowing that at some point, for a little while anyway, he'd had a much larger dick. He's grown into his adult body and he didn't do anything special after he'd gotten back to being 13. 

He didn't do anything, really, but wish to go back.

One of the things that depresses him and bothers him and keeps him up at night (walkie talkie turned off because even Billy doesn't understand everything) is that the whole time he was an adult, he felt like a kid, now as a kid, he feels like an adult. 

He finishes high school early and takes off for college almost immediately. Billy follows him, getting his GED and picking a trade school in the same town as Josh's university and he still feels like a pod person all the time. 

It's been too many years for anyone else to want to talk about it, but it turns out that's something that doesn't just go away - waking up as a man. He thinks about waking up as a man every night when he goes to sleep in his awkward dorm room bed, his roommate's sleep-talking the soundtrack to the awful way his life has turned into a game. If he could only figure out where or what the ice wizard was, he would fucking nuke the shit out of it. 

At 21, he tastes caviar again. It's like when he tries to like a song and doesn't and then he hears it, months later, in Billy's car or in some store and he likes it - not because the song has changed, but because he has, just a little bit this time, and it's always nice when something seems familiar.

By the time he's swallowed his third cracker full of it, he's decided to track down Susan. He'd written her only once, at 15, when he'd gotten his first chest hair (he didn't mention that part). He tried to get across how screwed up and inside out he felt, but he must not have done too good of a job - she never wrote back. 

It probably didn't help that he'd included the comic he and Billy drew about a boy trapped in a man's body. It was awesome, but, still - weird. 

The first time he actually sees Susan he is almost exactly between 13 and 30 and she makes him feel simultaneously both ages. She looks older, her face has a few lines and she looks like she hasn't slept in months, years even. 

It turns out, she had a son, and he was in the hospital and then he was out and then he was in and out again but it was right when Josh's letter had arrived and it was all too much. She could only meet him for a short time, she was still upset and worried over everything, she tells him.

It never occurred to him to think about the impact he'd had on her life, but it's clear almost immediately that he'd fucked her up, too. She'd switched jobs, moving out to California for a little while. She met a man who "stayed young" surfing and they'd married after dating for like, eight months or something. She'd never received his first letter (or the comic, thank god), but admits she doesn't know if she'd have written back anyway. 

When they stand to leave, she kisses him, not on the forehead this time, but on the mouth. It's somehow less sexy than the forehead kiss. He didn't even think that was possible.

He's always thought, if a girl ever believes him, one that isn't Susan, he'll marry her. He meets a girl at the grocery store at 23 that believes him, but she says something like, oh me too, a lot of, you know, tragic stuff happened to me. I grew up too fast, too. She read a lot of philosophy and psychology books and used words like transcendent and revolutionary and he doesn't marry her. He breaks up with her after a month and amends his qualifications. If a girl never asks why he hates trampolines, he'll marry her.

He turns 30 in 2005. He'd spent the entire year leading up to it just preparing. 

He was not going to have a breakdown.

He was not going to audit and take stock of his life.

He was not going to stare into the mirror for hours.

He was not going to even having a birthday cake, goddamn it.

He does all those things. 

The woman he's dating - named, weirdly, Cynthia - is fantastic. But she doesn't know the whole story, she just thinks he was molested or bullied or something he doesn't want to talk about. He's not going to marry her until he tells her, he just...can't figure out how to tell her. It's such a fucked up, weird thing, you know?

But not knowing, Cynthia throws him a surprise party. Billy's there, going by Bill now and Bill's girlfriend deals weed and she's there and Josh smokes a bowl, all by himself, a birthday bowl, and then he spends the rest of the night locked in the bathroom, thirsty and hungry and totally out of it.

In the mirror he sees himself at 30, for the second time. He looks exactly the same except for a scar on his cheek from some pick-up roller hockey game when he was in college. He looks exactly the same, but feels totally different.

The first time he was 30, he worked at a toy company. He works at an airline now.

The first time he was 30, he was best friends with Billy. He's old friends with "Bill" now.

The first time he was 30, he was on a practice run. He's in the big game now.

The worst is: The first time he was 30, he felt like a kid. He feels like a kid now. 

He finally comes out of the bathroom at 2 a.m. when it's the next day and no longer his birthday. 

Cynthia's at the door saying goodbye to the last of the guests and instead of going to join her, he sits down on the couch and puts his head in his hands.

She sits next to him and he looks at her sideways and braces for the yelling that's about to happen, but instead she just puts her hand on his back and rubs little circles.

"What's wrong, Josh? Seriously."

"I'm 30."

"So am I."

"You don't understand, 30 is, um, a really important age to me."

"You're right, I don't understand because you won't - "

He spills it all out then and to her credit she only interrupts him once.

"How much did you smoke? Jesus Christ, Josh."

But he powers through and she believes him or she doesn't, but he's pretty sure she no longer thinks he's on drugs. 

Two weeks later, he's making dinner and she walks in the kitchen. Someone called for him while he was at work, some woman named Susan, she says.

She says Susan wanted to know how he was holding up, if he was enjoying life. She says she sounded sad.

"You were telling the truth, weren't you?"

"Yeah."

"I think I believe you."

"That's good enough."

He proposes and she accepts.

Billy arranges for a Zoltar machine at the wedding reception, but it's not the same one. 

He makes a wish anyway.

The next morning, he wakes up as a man. 

 


End file.
